ActiveKB NX Status Update

ActiveKB NX development has been going rather well. We're close to a beta release, so I thought I'd share the features that have made it into this rather huge update.

My personal favorite features are that ActiveKB no longer needs Apache to run and that it is extremely stable with lots of content. We're talking 50,000 articles + on a basic desktop PC. (See below for more details)

In making it work with lots of content I think I've done enough optimizations that everyone using ActiveKB for more than a handful of questions should notice some nice speedups. More importantly I think, is that no-one should really notice any slowdowns. I've optimized for a large number of questions but I've tried to make it so that all aspects of the system should scale MUCH better then ActiveKB 2005 which means that you can rely on ActiveKB to meet your needs for a much longer period of time.

In making it work without Apache, people who run a different web server to Apache no longer have to install Apache separately simply for their knowledge base. They can run it alongside their ASP Intranet or website which should make life easier. Also, I've done a lot of the groundwork for making the back end database run on PostgreSQL, as well as MySQL. Unfortunately I havn't been able to get this going for NX but I expect to have it ready for NX2. This should hopefully give users more options for running ActiveKB.

Here's a list of the upcoming features for ActiveKB NX:

• ActiveKB now no longer requires Apache to run. If you want search engine friendly URLs you still need Apache however for systems where this isn't a requirement you can run ActiveKB on most web servers (Tested on Apache on Linux,LightTPD on Windows and IIS 5.1 on Windows. It should work on pretty much any web server).
• Massive performance increases. Active KB can easily handle in excess of 50,000 questions and 1,000 categories since this is roughly the size of the database used for developing the system. On the development system with this size, a manage question page takes roughly half a second to load and the front page with 213 top level categories takes about 3 seconds to load. This is on a Windows desktop thats running with a 2.4Ghz P4 CPU and 768M of RAM. Obviously on a proper server the system will run better but that should give you an idea of its performance.
• Mass actions - Delete, approve etc multiple comments, questions etc in one go
• Users searches are now stored in the database so you can see what people are looking for most often and if it returned results or not
  
• Google style suggest based on previous users searches
  
• The front page now can show the most recently updated questions
  
• Image verification (CAPTCHA) protection on comment posting
  
• Ability to edit user submitted comments
  
• User groups - permissions are now assigned to a group and users can be assigned  to groups. These groups can be made "Contactable". When you have 1 or more contactable groups, then on the contact us page a drop down will be shown  with the group names. When a user submits a contact us it will email all members  of the group that they select. Groups can also apply to a category so that you can have fairly fine grained control over permissions.
  
• Updated template system
  
• Meta keywords and descriptions are now settable per question.
  
• The admin gets emailed when a user posts a comment
  
• My Account - users can modify some of their details themselves.
  
• Versioning for questions. Question history is now saved. By default this is set to keep the last 5 revisions but this can be increased or disabled with a  minor code change. You can also rollback to a previous version of a question.
  
• Advanced search for questions in the backed. This makes managing lots of  questions much easier.
  
• Ability to take a user submitted question, create an Active KB question out of it and then email the submitter (optional) to let them know that an answer has been created for their question
  
• The ARS system has been tweaked so that it will hopefully deliver an answer to a user more often.
  
• Front end glossary list
  
• Category passwords now cascade to sub categories. If a parent category has a password you need to enter that password before accessing anything under it or under categories under it. Previously a password only ever applied to a specific category.
  
• Users can now subscribe to a question. When changes to the question are made the system can email the users to let them know about the changes.
  
• Questions can be imported from a CSV file
  
• The config and database can be backed up on the server. No need to have access to phpmyadmin to backup your system
  
• The type of searching can be changed in the backend
  
• A username/password can be set for the front end.
  
• Views and ratings for a question can be reset in the backend
  
• A new css template is going to be bundled with ActiveKB NX which should make customising the frontend easier

Hopefully a beta version of ActiveKB NX should be ready in the next couple of weeks. All features have been finalized and while we're still accepting feature requests, most probably they won't make it to this release.

I should also warn you that the price of ActiveKB will be going up with the NX release, so if you haven't already, make sure to purchase early so you can get the free NX upgrade when it's released.

Any feedback, questions please post a comment to this blog.